Nitin Mishra‘s kin apparently didn’t know about the case until a back scan of online news reports revealed that the English newspaper Albanian Daily News had reported on October 22 the arrest of an Indian by that name in Rinas, 20km from Tirana. The report quoted Albanian police as saying they acted on two red-corner notices and as many warrants issued against Nitin by the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
The businessman, who was to return home from his first trip abroad on October 18, had been incommunicado for a week before briefly calling his father in Lucknow’s Rajajipuram on October 21, his family said. He had barely mentioned being mysteriously detained when the call got disconnected.
The Mishras haven’t heard from him since or received any intimation from the Albanian authorities despite repeated attempts to contact them. “My son is the breadwinner of the family,” Nitin’s father Vasudev Mishra told TOI. “He flew to Tirana via Dubai on October 12 to promote his brand of local readymade garments there. My fast food business shut during the pandemic. My wife has cancer, and now this,” he said.
Lawyer Vivek Rai, whom the family contacted after reading the news report on his arrest, got them in touch with UK-based advocate Singh, who has taken up several such cases involving Indians. “We will be writing to the European Court of Human Rights about the case. An Indian national can’t be arrested abroad on charges of drug peddling without an intimation to the consulate there. We will then petition the PMO and the ministry of external affairs for their intervention,” Singh told TOI over the phone from London.
The UK lawyer said his team had already lodged a complaint with the Albanian authorities about Nitin being allegedly not provided counsel so far. “He must get a fair representation in a court of law,” Singh said. “Prima facie, it appears that it’s a case of mistaken identity, or his credentials were stolen and he was framed,”he said.
The news report on Mishra’s arrest quoted Albanian officials as saying Nitin’s arrest was the result of coordination between “state police and the American DEA”, with the objective being his extradition to the US for trial on drug trafficking charges. “This was the first strike that the DEA office made in Albania,” the statement said.
Back home, Nitin’s father said it was unbelievable that a young man who had “never been in a brawl even in school” would be arrested in a foreign country for allegedly trafficking drugs. “After clearing the Class XII board exams in 2009, he went to Delhi to study web designing and digital marketing. In 2011, he took a job in a call centre there. He returned to Lucknow in 2018 after my wife Chhavi was diagnosed with cancer,” Vasudev said. “Since my fast food business shut during the pandemic, my son has been our only source of hope.”
TOI couldn’t immediately get a confirmation from the MEA about Nitin’s allegedly hush-hush arrest on unconfirmed drug charges.